III.

Film Portrait was Hill’s last film. Within weeks of its premiere at the Museum of Modern Art he was dead from cancer. In 1989, Stan Brakhage, probably the world’s most seminal and prolific personal filmmaker, called it “the only direct autobiography we have in film,” and cited its influence on subsequent autobiographical films by himself (Sincerity and Duplicity), James Broughton ( Testament ), and Jonas Mekas (Diaries, Notes, Sketches ). ⁸ Brakhage’s characterization of Film Portrait as a “very straight attempt to present autobiography on film” is accurate, but incomplete, insofar as the film also includes discussions of the history of film (Hill observes that he and the medium grew up together), and of the temporal and alchemical character of film. The latter topic takes Hill rather directly into the philosophic issue of film’s ontology. Nonetheless, Hill’s life, his vocation as a film artist, informs whatever else the film attends to. The film is most fruitfully interpreted as a filmic anamnesis, and as an anamnestic film. The first function informs its making; the second its viewing by the creator and others. ⁹

Jung’s utility in understanding Hill’s films does not come down to one idea; it draws instead from a multiplicity of notions and sources, all of which can be linked psychologically, but which do not necessarily follow one another in strict logical fashion. (Hence the tribulations we all experience trying in our writing to be both psychological and logical.) These include Jung’s own autobiographical statement (Memories, Dreams, Reflections ), individuation, persona, and vocation psychology, the puer-senex and puer-mother tandems, the function and attitude typologies, the depth psychology of alchemy, and the relationship of aesthetic creation to psychological self-realization. No full application of these interpretative parameters will be attempted here. Instead, I will work selectively and suggestively, in the hope that my observations will draw the reader back to the film itself.

Briefly, I will sketch out how the film can be understood from a Jungian perspective as an anamnesis of individuation, then as a demonstration of film as an alchemical medium of expression.

First, as an anamnesis of individuation: Hill was the grandson of James J. Hill, the railroad baron who pushed the American railroad from east to west on the idee fixe that “people should move along a line of shared weather.” ¹⁰ This grandfather, who lived next door in St. Paul, dominated the extended family. In Film Portrait he hovers over Hill’s early life as a negative senex. “The negative senex is the senex split from its own puer aspect. He has lost his ‘child’ “is the way James Hillman describes this archetypal constellation—a fact poignantly implied in Hill’s remark that “this family to which I belonged did not belong to me.” ¹¹

As one might expect, such a familial environment carried within it severe persona expectations. Hill suffered from these because his nascent artistic vocation, his inner calling to a life of image-making, had little legitimacy in his grandfather’s eyes. The business and political personae considered legitimate, i.e., “manly,” within this environment would have been experienced by Hill as socially-sanctioned, publicly-imposed masks of feigned individuality, very much in keeping with the persona psychology described by Jung in Two Essays in Analytical Psychology:

"/The persona/ is, as its name implies, only a mask of the collective psyche, a mask that feigns individuality, making others and oneself believe that one is individual, whereas one is simply acting a role through which the collective psyche speaks." ¹²

Vocation psychology, described by Jung in “The Development of Personality,” is a quite different matter, insofar as it involves heeding an inner voice which sounds the call to personal integrity, and which insists on being obeyed:

What is it, in the end, that induces a man to go his own way....It is what is commonly  called vocation: an irrational factor that destines a man to emancipate himself from the herd and from its well-worn paths. True personality is always a vocation and puts its trust in it as in God, despite its being, as the ordinary man would say, only a personal feeling. But vocation acts like a law of God from which there is no escape. The fact that many a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing to one who has a vocation....The best known example of this is Faust, and an historical instance is provided by the daemon of Socrates. ¹³

Hill’s response to this environment is clearly marked by aspects of puer psychology, aspects of which he kept to the end of his life, if this final film is believed. These include an early and deep response to beauty; a creative relationship to the feminine through a series of females—including his mother, a blind Native American shamaness, Maud Oakes, and female characters in his 1932 personal film, The Fortune Teller ; emphasis upon creative renewal and “possibilities”; and the overcoming of time as embodied in the senex. These last two aspects begin and end the film.

The first scene has the 66-year-old Hill shaving and musing intuitively over his future as an old man: possible futures, impossible ones (e.g., Pope or family patriarch), hoped for and unhoped for ones. He longs for a present that remains present, but acknowledges that the present is always already past. “This is the me that am,” he says, “or, rather, the me that was at that moment and never will be again. The me that am, alas, does not last as long as a single cinematographic frame.” Hill will find his personal solution to the problem of time’s passing in his alchemical view of film, as we shall discover later.

That a consideration of history, including personal history in autobiography, should call forth the puer-senex pair James Hillman states is not a surprise. As he puts it:

Our polarities—senex and puer—provide the archetype for the psychological foundation of the problem of history. First, in the conventional sense, puer and senex are history   as a process through time from beginning to end. And second, history as a problem in which I am caught, for which I suffer and from which I long to be redeemed, is given by the pair as Father Time and Eternal Youth, temporality and eternity, and the puzzling paradoxes of their connection. To be involved with these figures is to be drawn into history. To be identified with either is to be dominated by an archetypal attitude towards history: the puer who transcends history and leaps out of time, and is as such a-historical, or anti-historical in protest and revolt; or the senex who is an image of history itself and of the permanent truth revealed through history. ¹⁴

In this context Hillman speaks of a need: the “human ideal in which the polarity youth-age works towards a balance.” ¹⁵ As Film Portrait draws to its close, its own “old age,” Hill, himself near death, appears to be striving for just such a balance, perhaps made possible by his relationship to two charismatic embodiments of the positive senex: Albert Schweitzer and C.G. Jung. This balance, like the problem of time’s passing, will partially find its expression in Hill’s alchemical view of film’s ontology. It is also evident in the film’s conclusion.

The film’s very last image is Hill’s replication of the putatively first “public” film images, shot by the Lumière brothers at La Ciotat in 1896. This image and Hill’s voice-over are philosophically rich: the train, Hill tells us, still arrives at La Ciotat, providing proof with his 1971 image. By this gesture he simultaneously identifies himself with two of the progenitors of film, renews their seminal beginning of film by placing its duplication in 1971, and asserts the power of film to overcome time by preserving the past.

Just prior to this concluding image, Hill is seen swimming in the surf of the Mediterranean Sea with a woman. In voice-over he expresses his faith that film’s possibilities are “still wide open,” symbolically linking his own creativity and film’s with the sea as an image of the creative matrix we now call the unconscious. This image is the last of the series linking Hill’s creativity and self-realization to his relationship with women. They are all, one cannot resist saying, pregnant with significance, none more so than the very first, in which Hill finds his vocation while spending his early childhood nap-period in his mother’s room. There, by manipulating the double shades on the windows, Hill discovers for himself the principle of the camera obscura, and in the process finds the means to invert his grandfather’s next-door mansion. The power to manipulate and, in one sense, overcome his grandfather’s world through such means was not lost on Hill. This, in answer to his own voice-over question, is where children’s games lead: in his case, into a life of image-making via painting and filmmaking. We know from Donald Winnicott, the English child psychoanalyst, how the capacity and license to play elicits what he calls the “true self,” and here we see Hill’s true self being born, as it were, in the womb which was his mother’s room. ¹⁶

By way of contrast, soon after this, Hill includes newsreel footage of the family, shot by a Hollywood cameraman brought into the family by his father, in which Hill is made to pretend to be working on a painting that is not his own, but a professional’s. The two scenes present with clarity the difference between images linked to his true self, and one linked with a false self imposed by his father. Little wonder, then, that Hill states that he was, during his childhood, “living a life apart,” and being initiated personally, secretly, into the “mysteries of the unconscious,” including the “authenticity of dreams.

The second incident occurs when Hill is twelve or thirteen. At this time his father was taking the family along on extended trips into traditional Blackfoot Indian lands, where he was in the process of helping “without guilt” to uproot the Indians for a national park, which the railroad would supply with tourists. Here a most peculiar event happens. Hill tells us the Blackfoot were still “authentic”; their authenticity must have struck a resonant chord with this adolescent boy who was already initiated into the “authenticity of dreams.” He learned something of their songs, dances, and sign language. Then he was accepted into the tribe by an “ancient blind woman,” and given an Indian name. The symbolism of these matters did not escape Hill: in the voice-over he tells us he shared his new name with no one else, although he now shares it with his viewers at the end of his life. He means the name was a secret; he also means it separated him from his family. In both cases, this secret name is a marker of individuation, which is partly defined as the process of differentiation and self-realization of the particular and limited individual one is. The holding of personal secrets as a crucial aspect of individuation, especially early in life, is well described by Jung in Memories, Dreams, Reflections . ¹⁷

The woman’s blindness marks her as a seer, whose simultaneous initiation of Hill into the tribe and into himself gives his individuation-saga an appropriately shamanic character. Here we meet one of the ironies in stories of individuation: had Hill not been the grandson of a rich, powerful man, he would have never gained such contact with the Blackfoot; yet, that contact initiated him into a realm his grandfather would never understand, a realm that fed Hill’s differentiation from his grandfather’s world. While the family participated without guilt in the destruction of Native American culture, Hill’s own individuation was being aided by his initiation into it. By this irony Hill was provided the opportunity to be initiated by a culture where the liminality of traditional rites of passage still operated; thus he could say with authority “here ended my childhood.” ¹⁸

Hill’s next creative experience of the feminine does not occur until 1932, when he was twenty-seven. In that year he made his first complete film, The Fortune Teller. (Earlier films, including one titled The Magic Umbrella, made in 1927, and included in Film Portrait, were not considered truly his own by Hill; he described The Magic Umbrella as a “home movie.” ¹⁹ Hill portrays the intervening years as a wasteland in which he “did what he was told to do, what he was supposed to do.” For six years he was seriously ill with thyroid problems. Of the period between his thirteenth and twenty-third years he shows almost nothing in Film Portrait. The next several years he played at living, unknowingly waiting, he says, for certain events and things, in order to experience the reality of the present and to imagine a livable future. The image Hill provides of these empty years has him and friends dancing in forward and reverse motion, back and forth, around an empty center. The “event” was his decision to settle in Cassis, France, on the Mediterranean. Nearby was La Ciotat, the summer residence of the now-aged Lumiere brothers.

The”thing” was the Eastman Kodak 16mm Special, whose significance resided in the fact that it was the first 16mm camera whose engineering and optics allowed the non-studio filmmaker a full range of expressive possibilities. One might say metaphorically that the Eastman Kodak Special allowed the 16mm film gauge to escape its home-movie persona, and to gain a vocation as a medium for artistic creativity. In this sense, the medium, like Hill, is realizing progressively its artistic nature. (The home movies Hill includes from this period have the same lack of integrity he himself suffered: “heads cut off; no action carried through to completion.”) Hill himself seems to have seen it somewhat this way, insofar as the camera constellated in him a fruitful “investigation of the pictorial language of cinema,” as he states it. With these newly discovered “laws” of pictorial language, Hill seems to have understood that he could see the world anew, exercising his imagination in the creation of an imaginal reality—echoes of MacDougall on film’s “double nature.” The result was The Fortune Teller , a haunting, beautiful, and serene film; unreleased until its inclusion in Film Portrait, almost forty years later.

This film marks Hill’s birth as a film artist of psychological depth and power. In it a washerwoman receives a conch-shell call to leave her drying laundry and have her fortune told by another young woman, a gypsy. After the first cards are drawn—the Queen of Hearts and the Jack of Spades—stones cover the cards. In turn, the stones are covered by water, and abstract designs shimmer across its surface. A submerged man’s body emerges into these designs, superimposed over the sleeping washerwoman’s face. Out of the water’s shimmering body emerge flowers. The woman makes a wreath for her head, over which are superimposed lights, and the swimming man in the shimmering water. Emerging out of the sea, the man stands at the boundary of sea and land, a pregnant, liminal space, betwixt and between. The wreath appears to be floating on the water. Time reveals it is attached to the head of the woman, who rises out of the sea to stand next to the man. (This description is incomplete, but sufficient for an initial, suggestive interpretation.) ²⁰

At the very least, one can say about this film that it expresses Hill’s deep receptivity to the feminine, here more appropriately called the anima than the mother or shamanic crone, given the youth of the washerwoman and the gypsy fortune-teller. The authority with which the film expresses psychological depth also reveals that here the anima is functioning as Jung claims it should: as an inner bridge between the ego and the transpersonal unconscious. ²¹ The filmic story is not a capricious invention, but a symbolic externalization of an inner psychic process, in which film images and film techniques operate as matter did for the alchemists, who, in Jung’s thesis, were projecting inner transformations onto matter. Here we have the first clear indication of how film was operating alchemically for Hill—and, parenthetically, for a significant set of our personal filmmakers. ²²

But why did Hill hold back this film for almost forty years? I believe it is because this film for Hill carries an essential secret: he was homosexual. This does not appear to be a secret Hill hid from himself, but a personal truth he wisely chose not to broadcast in an explicit manner. That is, the film is not an exercise in self-delusion, but a poetic rendering. The film’s mystery and power are not in the secret, but in the rendering.

Hill’s familial environment, presided over by his patriarchal grandfather, this hidden fact may well have been a cause for Hill’s adolescent sickness and his silence about his teens and early twenties. These may have been the years when Hill first experienced the homosexuality that was part of his integrity. The blind Blackfoot woman could give him his true name, his individuated name, but she could not protect him from the outer and inner pressures which the particulars of his individuation-sage apparently produced.

These are matters perhaps better interpreted by gay film scholars, but the following intuitive responses and speculations are not, I think, out of order: The Fortune Teller did not “click” for me until I imagined Hill identifying himself with the washerwoman, in which case, one can imagine the fortune-teller as Hill-the-washerwoman’s anima—she guides his ego to the “sea.” From this point of view the man’s appearance in the film signals Hill’s yearning for, and acceptance of, a male lover—whom he meets face-to-face by emerging out of the same sea in which we first saw the man submerged. The imagery suggests both birth (in this case, the emergence of Hill’s homosexuality) and the alchemical operations solutio and coniunctio—the latter the culmination of the entire alchemical opus, signaling the union of opposites, frequently imaged as sun and moon, or male and female. The importance of solutio is signaled by the alchemical directive: “until all be made water, perform no operation.” “Basically, solutio turns a solid into liquid....Water was thought of as the womb and solutio as a return to the womb for rebirth,” is how Edward Edinger describes it. ²³ Here the womb is Hill’s own alchemical filmmaking, into which he was first born in his mother’s nap room. At the psychological level, he is now capable of birthing himself, the proof of which is his “child,” The Fortune Teller.